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Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. Brian Richardson, ed. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 399. $84.95 (cloth); $26.95 (paper).
Brian Richardson's exemplary, indispensable new anthology collects 27 essential selections from the longer history of narrative theory. The selections are both foundational and revisionary, various in their critical and ideological perspectives, and a great mix of old and new. Richardson has grouped them beautifully, according to the five aspects of "narrative dynamics," and he has introduced the five groups with short essays that together amount to a masterful survey of the field. Perfectly structured, the book as a whole is really a model of its kind, and will be a very valuable resource for research and teaching of every variety.
The "dynamics" in question here are the narrative "movements" of time, plot, sequence, closure, and framing. In each category, there are good old standards (including, for example, Bakhtin, Genette, Ricoeur, Forster, Propp, Frye, Brooks, Said, Derrida), exciting new revisions (from Susan Winnett, Robyn Warhol, Russell Reising, and Richardson himself), and much that falls gracefully between. The introductory essays amount to 40 pages or so of pure-gold information, and the bibliography, suggestions for further reading, and list of short narrative examples relevant to each category make Narrative Dynamics impressively comprehensive.
Narrative Dynamics solves a few of the problems that have made other such anthologies less than fully useful. Whereas others have cast their net too widely-claiming, for example, to take on...